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We visited this place for the first time 35 years ago. We liked the mountain above Tangier and were thinking of buying a house. Leaving my partner, Stephan, to exchange pleasantries with the owner on the terrace, I followed the gardener.
Mohammed was a stocky man in his fifties, with a receding hairline and a small, carefully trimmed grey beard. I had never met him before and I didn’t yet speak a word of Arabic; however, despite his being deaf and dumb, in just 15 minutes he managed to make me understand that the situation was dire. Among the withered flower-beds and saplings suffering from the drought, he showed me the crumbling well. The garden was parched, the arid soil hadn’t seen a handful of manure in years and Mohammed had resorted to pruning with his bare hands because he no longer had any secateurs. He had been taking advantage of rare downpours of rain to plant the cuttings given to him by gardener friends who worked for other nasrani (expat Europeans). On the last terrace, where the owner never ventured, he proudly showed me a small patch of annuals – zinnias, marigolds and cosmos, which he’d grown by secretly hooking up the hose to a tap in the house: his treasure, like all treasures, was stolen. Otherwise condemned to inactivity, Mohammed transmitted a silent SOS. As I walked back up to the terrace where Stephan and the owner stood waiting for us, I was shaking with indignation and impatience. This garden – and the man who tended to it – deserved much better.
The name of the house, Tebarek Allah, means ‘blessed by God’; no name could better describe this place. As soon as it was ours, Stephan and I got to work. We began by sourcing plants. Many came from the countryside that lay beyond the villas and their gardens, past rushes and eucalyptus trees – a domain of small huts and vegetable patches, where local grandmothers grew and sold their edible wares. With their little shawls and big wellies, these women milked cows dried figs and almonds in bed sheets, wrapped bunches of bananas in jute sacks for ripening and cooked huge pots of apricot jam. They also sold plants and cuttings. We purchased African lilies and roses from a large, hirsute man who healed wounded birds in a hut made of rushes that he nestled among the ferns. He plastered the broken wings of ravens and hoopoes, and stroked buzzards, without fear of a sudden twitch of a neck or a sharp beak. To feed them, he gathered the carcasses of stray dogs. Every once in a while, he’d try to flog me some ‘Phoenician’ statues, which he said he’d found in a cave.
We bought some hibiscuses and mock oranges, which were only a foot high but already in flower, from the roof of a ghostly apartment block where the widow of one of Mohammed’s friends bred silkworms; a rare magnolia awaited me in a hut smothered by a Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’, which looked like a flock of canaries in love. Our quest led us to Mjiddo, who made ends meet by selling little baskets of blackberries in the village square while also growing 30 or so varieties of bowstring hemp and almost as many types of aspidistras; Fatna, a master at propagating peaches and plums; Jemila, who tended to mysterious species of begonias and fuchsias in the small courtyard where she would sit at her sewing machine surrounded by dozens of cats; and Tarek, god of sage bushes with flowers and foliage in startling violets, blues, oranges and scarlets. And all of this floral bounty was to be found just a few miles from the increasingly built-up centre of the city, with the shimmering sea as a backdrop.
Together with Mohammed, we built arbours and huts that would eventually become covered with creepers; we pulled wires through the branches so that the new wisterias and jasmines could grow from tree to tree, casting a fragrant shadow; we staked young trees and filled vases, arranging them on the terraces and along the pathways. Across the whole garden we added rich topsoil, buried bulbs and rhizomes, sowed seeds, planted, fertilised and mulched, constantly tormented by the need to find new combinations, attentive to the shapes, the colours, the dialogues between fragrances – the vivid marvel-of-Peru teasing the jasmine, the nocturnal blooming queen-of-the-night giving way to the dawn chorus of white morning glory, the honeysuckle and Queen of Sheba commingling with the Rangoon creeper.
One day, when the gardener’s arthritis prevented him from joining us, a younger Mohammed took his place: the son of his wife, Ftoma. I realised that the young man had learned how to control the anxiety of inexperienced gardeners when he left our epiphytic ferns thirsty for long periods of time, as is the case in their natural habitat. At that moment, I understood that I could trust him. He’s still with us to this day.
In 35 years, Tangier has changed and, thanks to the purchase of an additional plot of land, our garden has grown even bigger. Several distinguished botanists and gardeners have given me advice on this plant collection, which keeps getting richer and richer. Many rare species have come to Tebarek Allah from nurseries all over the world, or are the fruit of exchanges with other enthusiasts. But when I wander around the terraces, where I am amazed each time by the density of the vegetation and the continuous changes of ambience created by the varying combinations of flowers and their fragrances, I see the garden as it once was. I imagine Mohammed beside me, with his grey beard and his enthusiasm. And beyond the gate, instead of the concrete-and-glass villas that have popped up all over this part of Tangier like poisonous mushrooms, our green-fingered friends await us in their huts and sheds, in the most beautiful gardens in the world.
A version of this article appears in the February 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
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